Cheap shots against Palin

Fri Nov 7 17:31:50 PST 2008

Palin jumped in.  She could have said no! She wanted this. Loved the attention and the$150,000 worth of clothes.

----
Paul Finkelman
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, NY 12208

518-445-3386 (p)
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pfink at albanylaw.edu

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--- On Fri, 11/7/08, Robert Sheridan <rs at robertsheridan.com> wrote:

From: Robert Sheridan <rs at robertsheridan.com>
Subject: Re: Cheap shots against Palin
To: "Richard Dougherty" <doughr at udallas.edu>, paul.finkelman at yahoo.com
Cc: "CONLAWPROF Prof list" <CONLAWPROF at lists.ucla.edu>
Date: Friday, November 7, 2008, 12:43 PM

I think that the critics of my criticism make very good points.  I would say this:

I'm not a fan of Palin as a VP candidate, perhaps in part because of the Couric interview which demonstrated certain lacks.  

I was surprised that I found myself thinking that Palin had been bushwacked..

The image I have in mind (perhaps quite incorrectly) is of Couric approaching her in a hallway, perhaps at the U.N., and Palin submitting to be interviewed.  Mea culpa if the thing was planned and she didn't do well.

In that case, the fault dear Bruti, lies with McCain for setting her up.

I agree, that when you put your witness on the stand, her fate is in the hands of the gods.

In court you have preparation, a referee, a set of rules, time to think if you're lucky or clever enough, and your lawyer.

Palin was thrown in bare, with none of these, in shark-filled waters.

Bad, McCain.

rs
sfls

On Nov 7, 2008, at 9:32 AM, Richard Dougherty wrote:

I think we can all tell the difference between a faculty member who asks a question of a student, genuinely seeking an answer, and one who asks a question to antagonize a particular student.  This calls for looking at the questioning in context. Without defending Palin's response, the fact that Couric belabored the point suggests something more was going on.  If not, why no follow-up by her on Joe Biden's "FDR on TV in 1929" comment?  Does that suggest that he "knew less than an average high school student or undergraduate political science or history major"?  And do you want someone like that as VP -- someone brought on board precisely because of his vast knowledge and experience?

Richard Dougherty

-----Original Message-----
From: "Frank Cross" <crossf at mail.utexas.edu>
Sent 11/7/2008 10:08:58 AM
To: "Robert Sheridan" <rs at robertsheridan.com>, "CONLAWPROF Prof list" <CONLAWPROF at lists.ucla.edu>
Subject: Re: Cheap shots against Palin

I didn't see the entire interview, but the most significant part of the Couric interview in the blogosphere, it seems, was her inability to disclose what newspapers or magazines she read.  That didn't seem like an ambush question and seemed at least bizarre, if not telling.  Nor do I think it was any sort of ambush question to ask her about a second Supreme Court opinion.  Especially since Palin had very recently spoken out about the Exxon Valdez punitive damages judgment.  If anything, Couric would have thought that was a softball, insofar as she had every reason to believe that Palin was well able to speak about that case.

At 09:56 AM 11/7/2008, Robert Sheridan wrote:

NPR this morning broadcast a clip from the Katie Couric ambush interview of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (who was meeting diplomats at the U.N. as part of her positioning process as McCain's VP choice) in which the question asked was (not an exact quote) in essence:  Apart from Roe v. Wade, what Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with? and she was stuck for an answer.

Earlier in this list we kicked around whether she should be briefed on such arcana as, for example, who the president of Turkmenistan was.  One position was that she should be briefed on arcana and another was that there was no time and that she should turn the question on the questioner in order to duck it since it was an unfair "gotcha" question.

It was likely that Sarah from Alaska (as she referenced herself the other day) didn't know who the Turkmen strongman was.  Yet, she was running for an office where such knowledge was of potentially considerable importance.  She could be briefed when it became important, however.  This is one of the reasons we have a State Department which, I presume, has a Turkmenistan desk, or at least a stool, along and a guy who sits on it and can do the briefing.

As I recall from the news, John Roberts, when a White House staffer, helped brief Pres. Reagan's nominee to the Court, one Sandra Day O'Connor, on what she needed to know in the way of Supreme Court decisions she was expected to know and either agree or disagree with before her Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.  When he was nominated to be Chief Justice, he received briefings, despite years of Supreme Court practice under his belt.

Yet here we have Sarah Palin being mocked, implicitly when not explicitly, for ignorance, which is not the same as stupidity.

And some of the people who do the mocking among the general public and the chattering class, probably have no better idea of Conlaw than does Katie Couric or me, for that matter.  I'd hate to be put to a test on all of the many cases I'm unfamiliar with, or who the president of any country apart from the current big three is.  They change, you know.  One day it's Chirac and the next it's Sarkozy.  And suddenly it's no longer Putin but Medvedev, unless you still count Putin, which may be no mistake.

The fault, if it was a fault, was that McCain selected a person not likely to have been well-briefed in advance as to such things.  The fault was his, knowing full well that candidates for the White House must be perfectly knowledgeable about everything or suffer being mocked, not hers.  She's a normal human being who rose to become the elected mayor and governor of her state, which makes her extraordinary.  It's also far more than I can claim despite some familiarity with Supreme Court gotcha questions.  This might make me feel superior, but that's a false and prideful position to have, not that there's any lack here.

As noted in other threads, there are no intellectual qualifications for these high offices.  The public is supposed to be able to figure out how well qualified their choices are.  Yet the public is being asked by the national media to disqualify candidates who fail the "gotch" test of ambush journalism.  Palin was in N.Y. on one matter when asked in a hallway by a nationally known media personality (a celebrity journalist who negotiates for $15 million in salary per annum) bearing a microphone and backed by a TV camera to speak on a subject that was currently off-topic and not briefed.  The president of the United States doesn't appear before the cameras for a press conference w/o being briefed by the world's greatest experts of the moment.  The fault was the campaign's for letting her get ambushed like that.  Who had her back?  No one.

It's not as though Couric didn't know about Palin's lack of exposure.  That was the whole point, to make a monkey out of her for her presumed lack of sophistication.

Was this wonderful journalism, exposing Palin's lack of briefing, or knowlege, or familiarity with what participants on this list regard as important, or was it partisanship?  Or a service in exposing McCain's judgment as reflected in a choice of running mate who was weak in important areas?

The thing that seems to be missing in the Couric interview is any clear indication as to why Palin should be expected to know Conlaw w/o having taken the course, where it is nowhere written that she was required to take the course, any more than McCain took the course, beyond his OJT.

Not a great moment in journalism, Couric.

rs
sfls

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Frank B. Cross
Herbert D. Kelleher Centennial Professor of Business Law
McCombs School of Business
University of Texas
CBA 5.202 (B6500)
Austin, TX 78712-0212
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